Deadlines!

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
— Douglas Adams

Last month, flush with the glow of working out a particularly thorny plot problem in PAP (seriously, Jane Austen, did you never consider the trouble you’d give me a few hundred years down the line?) I told my editor over shrimp tacos and strawberry ice cream floats that I’d have the draft of PAP done by the time I saw her at ALA.

Which is in 10 days.

Which is, I see now with the 20/20 hindsight that a few weeks of dealing with much-needed-to-be-dealt-with stuff on the homefront affords me, is so not going to happen. (Yes, editor, dear, I am pulling on the hairshirt right now.)

Now I’m thinking mid-July. And that’s if I really bust my butt the next few weeks.

(But seriously, crap keeps coming up. Like that car accident yesterday. I mean, I’m fine, but my whole morning was spent dealing with talking to the insurance company and getting Nikita towed and calling Sailor Boy a half-dozen times to assure him that I was fine, and by then I was so stressed I couldn’t even get it together enough to make a few paltry decisions about ordering bookmarks, let alone all important decisions about whether that adjective belongs in the third sentence after the scene break or not.)

So in the interest of butt-busting, I am here to make myself accountable to you, fine readers of the blog. Any suggestion on what I should do? I’m good with dares.